Special to CosmicTribune.com, August 25, 2025

Excerpts from weekly Sky&Telescope report.

MONDAY, AUGUST 25

■ While twilight is still fairly bright, can you catch the very thin Moon, not quite two days old, very low in the west-southwest? Bring binoculars. The Moon can help guide you to increasingly elusive Spica and Mars, as shown below.

For a few evenings the crescent Moon can help you locate Mars and Spica low in the west-southwest while the twilight sky is still bright. Binoculars or a low-power, wide-field telescope will help! Even the Moon itself may be hard to see on Monday the 25th.

For scale, Spica and Mars are now 12° apart: about a fist at arm’s length.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 26

■ Now the Moon is about equidistant between Spica and Mars, as shown above.

■ The brightest star high in the southeast these moonless nights is Altair, with little orange Tarazed above it by a finger-width at arm’s length.

Above Altair, slightly less far, is smaller, fainter Sagitta, the Arrow. It too points leftward. You’ll need a nice dark sky. Or binoculars.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 27

■ A winter preview: Step out before the first light of dawn any time this week, and in addition to Venus and Jupiter lighting the east, the sky will display the same starry panorama you’ll be seeing at dinnertime come January.

Orion is striding up in the southeast, with Aldebaran and then the Pleiades high above him. Sirius sparkles far down below Orion. The Gemini twins are lying on their sides well up in the east, though right now their heads Pollux and Castor are quite outdone by the Jupiter and Venus combo. By winter those planets will be very much elsewhere.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 28

■ Back to Aquila. One of the brightest Cepheid variable stars in the sky — a naked-eye, glance-up-to-check-it variable just waiting for you — is Eta Aquilae.

Never heard of it? It’s 8° south of Altair and pulses from magnitude 4.3 to 3.4 and back every 7.18 days. That’s slightly more than a doubling of brightness, then a halving. As with other classical Cepheids its rise to maximum is faster than its fade to minimum. Its period is so close to a week that you’ll find it repeating itself on the same weekdays for a month or two at a time.

Judge its brightness by comparing it between Theta Aquilae, magnitude 3.2; Delta Aql, mag. 3.4; Beta Aql; mag. 3.7; and Iota Aql, mag. 4.4.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 29

■ Saturn is the brightest dot low in the east right after dark. But as evening advances, it gets competition. Fomalhaut, the Autumn Star, makes its appearance above the southeast horizon some three fists to Saturn’s lower right. Its rising time will depend on where you live. But by 11 p.m. now, you should have no trouble identifying Fomalhaut low in the southeast if you have a good view in that direction. No other 1st-magnitude star is anywhere near there.

Saturn and Fomalhaut are magnitudes +0.7 and +1.2, respectively. And can you see that one twinkles more than the other?

■ As dawn brightens on Saturday morning the 30th, Jupiter, Venus, and low Mercury form a tall, nearly equally spaced straight line in the east, as shown below.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 30

■ First-quarter Moon (exactly so at 2:25 a.m. EDT tonight). The Moon shines in the southwest right after nightfall, in the head of Scorpius. Look for orange Antares about 5° to the Moon’s upper left. Lesser Delta Scorpii, the second-brightest star in the area, is a similar distance to the Moon’s upper right (for North America).

SUNDAY, AUGUST 31

■ Now Antares and Delta Sco line up to the right of the Moon.